Instructables Joins Autodesk

The Instructables community is incredible: you build, bake, and create amazing things, then share your projects and ideas with the world. I think it’s great when someone builds a project using instructions from our site, but it’s even more amazing when we inspire someone to start (or finish) that project they’ve always dreamed of. This has been my vision for Instructables: to have a positive impact on the world by giving passionate people great publishing tools to document their projects, and connect them to a community full of like-minded people.

Today I’m able to share my plan for accelerating that vision, and making Instructables an even better place to be. I’m proud to announce that Instructables is becoming part of Autodesk. Everyone here at Instructables HQ is absolutely thrilled, because this is going to be awesome for the entire Instructables community.

Instructables will still be the same site you love: we’ll keep the Instructables name and URL, the whole team is staying on, our policies haven’t changed, you still hold copyright to your projects, we’ll still run awesome contests, and the Robot isn’t going anywhere. However, we’ll now have the resources to make some improvements to the site I know our authors and community will love. Autodesk gives us the scale and support to grow and improve Instructables, build some great apps, and continue our mission of creating a positive impact on the world. Everyone on the Instructables team will become Autodesk employees, but we'll still wear our Robot t-shirts with pride.

Autodesk is a great cultural fit for Instructables. They make tools for creative people: they’re the world leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software. Even if you don’t recognize the name Autodesk, their software has powered the movies you watch, and designed the cars you drive and the buildings you work in. Instructables will be the community arm of the same team that makes 123D, SketchBook, Homestyler, and Pixlr, which will help provide creative tools, inspiration, and services for all types of creative people. Here’s Carl Bass, Autodesk’s CEO, talking more about his vision for the future of DIY.

We’ve had a great time building Instructables, and look forward to taking it to the next level. Thanks to the Instructables team for all their hard work, our investors including O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures and Baseline Ventures for believing in us, and to all the authors and community members who have made Instructables a great place to learn and share ideas.

I’m confident Autodesk will be a great home for Instructables, and will help us make Instructables an even better place to share your projects and ideas. I’m excited to join the Autodesk team, and get right to work. I’d also like to hear what you think: click here for info on an upcoming live Q&A event, and click here to suggest how we should co-opt the resources of a multi-national corporation to make Instructables even more awesome.

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as a long time "auto cad hater', im sorry to see you go down this road.with the soft ware they produce, non friendly to each other, import/export unfriendly, module dependent, exorbitant licensing fees, and too many companies used to be excellent, until they bought them, then they become middle of road, or low end junk without support, did i forget "pay as u go support"I am truly sorry for this site, so much good has come from it, and auto cad must definitely see where they can make more money than u do, make more fees or charges, and commercialize the site to auto cad garbage, otherwise they'd have left u alone

For the record, Autodesk makes AutoCAD. We aren't joining a software package.

That's not just nitpicking, but a pretty important difference. There's really no way that Autodesk software would make any sense as a requirement for any Instructable or Instructables user. Revit for recipes? That would be a wasteland.

You are certainly entitled to be a 'auto cad hater', but based on your complaints you don't seem to ever have actually used the product. I have used it since version 1.4---and yes there were a few stumbles along the way---the use of a 'dongle' comes to mind rather quickly. Equally quickly was their response to users when they removed the obnoxious POS. Give the size of the industry that supports manipulation of autocad file formats both the well documented 'public' one as well as the proprietary one, don't quite understand your import/export unfriendly remark. Not at all clear what you mean by 'non friendly to each other' remark so I can't comment on that. I've never found the update fees to be all that exorbitant (use the product, make money and once a year or so get a new version typically with greatly improved/expanded features all for a tiny fraction of full retail value), but your wallet and mine may be of different size. Haven't needed support for years, but even in the old days, the best support was other users---common with almost all complicated software. Perhaps you are one of those who is better off with an inking pen, triangles, t-squares and such like. Ever had the urge to find a stocking loom and burn it. Secretly believe that Ned Ludd lives on in spirit if not actuality?

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Bio:Eric J. Wilhelm is the founder of Instructables. He has a Ph.D. from MIT in Mechanical Engineering. Eric believes in making technology accessible through understanding, and strives to inspire others ...read more »